


will you trust me

by hotrodngold



Series: Turn It Off and Wait Ten Seconds [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Tony Stark, Brainwashing, Gen, M/M, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Other, Psychological Torture, Recovery, Teambuilding, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2018-12-23 02:48:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11980467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotrodngold/pseuds/hotrodngold
Summary: Listen, when you ask the Black Widow for a favour, you should be really,reallycareful what you ask for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snnaaft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snnaaft/gifts), [Bill_Longbow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bill_Longbow/gifts), [Mythdefied](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythdefied/gifts), [MassiveSpaceWren](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MassiveSpaceWren/gifts), [blue_pointer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_pointer/gifts), [Scifiroots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scifiroots/gifts).



> Alrighty. This is very long coming (I apologize) but is also the first bit of something that I should have finished awhile ago, so expect more to be forthcoming. Um oops. (more on this at the end.)
> 
> The working title of this was _Kiev_ for so very long but a bunch of wonderful people on the [WinterIron discord](https://discord.gg/A32YB6Y) (the lovely people this fic is dedicated to) convinced me to perhaps change it. The title is now courtesy of Imagine Dragons, [_I'm So Sorry_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7BEWkP7Gjg).
> 
>  **Note** : There's a fair bit of Ukrainian in this, a smaller bit of Russian, and one line, exactly, of Arabic. I speak none of these languages. (Though I'm working on Russian.) I was able to find someone to give the Russian a once over, I know no one who speaks Ukrainian even close to fluently, and I don't know anyone who even _dabbles_ in Arabic, so there will probably be mistakes. **Please tell me** if you see any.
> 
> Tied into that, the language choice here is very deliberate. Unless otherwise noted (Russ/Arb) all foreign dialogue is in Ukrainian.
> 
> If you haven't read one of my Terry Like Throwing Foreign Languages into Their Fic Because Fuck You That's Why fics, then you should know that **hovering over the foreign language will get you the translation.** [Click here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1055581/how-do-i-add-a-tool-tip-to-a-span-element) for instructions on how to do it in your own fic.
> 
> Very finally, this is a work of fiction, and I realize (and hope you do as well) that this is in no way a negative reflection on Ukraine, it's people or her culture. I needed somewhere far far away from major battle zones in a place most westerners forget exists, and the unfortunate truth is that you will always, _always_ have people who believe that they need to hurt the world before it hurts them back. The USA is no exception to nationalistic dickbags, I'm just borrowing the idea of some from another country.

_Life isn't always what you think it'd be_  
_Turn your head for one second and the tables turn_  
_And I know, I know that I did you wrong_  
_But will you trust me when I say that I'll_  
_Make it up to you somehow, somehow_

_So you gotta fire up, you gotta let go_  
_You'll never be loved till you've made your own_  
_You gotta face up, you gotta get yours_  
_You never know the top till you get too low_

**\--"I'm So Sorry" by Imagine Dragons**

* * *

“Widow.”

“Stark,” she replies.

Monday. Tony’s first appointment in the SI offices, Avengers Tower, New York.

The request had been short and simple: show up. 

When she had, the building had been as quiet as a tomb, and her heels clicking against the marble of the entry way had echoed in the empty space. Whether or not he’d told security and the receptionist to make themselves scarce was of little importance to her; the lack of witnesses was more informative than how he’d arranged it.

She could have arrived in her uniform boots, or even sneakers, but she honestly misses that short period of time where she played PA for him. It was restful, intriguing, and challenging in the complex simplicity of the role.

Now, she’s sat across from him, in a pencil skirt, a lovely pair of Valentino’s she bought just because she could, and a deliberately patient look.

He doesn’t fidget; hands laced together on top of his knees, but his eyes say reluctance as much as they do determination. It’s not an uncommon look for him, but usually she doesn’t see it outside of some emotional-vs-certain-death quandary.

He can hide emotions almost better than she can when he’s smiling, and nearly doesn’t emote at all when he’s focusing on a project, but put him in a situation where he doesn’t showboat and doesn’t have something to fiddle with, and his emotions shine through. Not that she ever has any idea what those emotions mean.  
It’s fascinating how much emotion he can betray while still keeping her in the dark.

He’s a better liar than she’d known, and _if_ she’d know that he lied like he breathed...

“I need a favour,” he says, and pauses again.

The windows at her right are heavily tinted, the thick door behind her locked moments after he let her through it.

When she got a glimpse at the calendar on his secretary’s desk, the large and bold **DO NOT DISTURB** had caught her eye more than the two hour time block. At first. 

Tony had told her eight to eight-thirty.

“A favour will cost you, Tony.” A prompt. Warning. Either. He’d never answer either on her time. Tony talks when Tony talks, and about what Tony wants. He’s always been very good at holding secrets, even when he was an irreverent playboy.

She actually watches him hesitate.

Stark doesn’t hesitate like normal people—and he doesn’t do it often—so it took her a while to pick up on the meaning behind that intense, searching stare. Because Tony never hesitates to give himself time. No, if Tony Stark needs to come to a decision, you can be sure he’s already considered all the angles, evaluated all the variables, and will arrive at a decision himself, based upon those facts. The only thing Tony is ever unsure of in his calculations is how other people will react to his decisions. 

“I’m willing to–... What do you want, Widow?” He cuts himself off—wise, not asking what her price is—still hesitating, trying to feel her out.

This is getting more intriguing, and more dangerous, the longer it plays out. Stark is going to do whatever he’s asking this favour for regardless, she knows this; it’s just a matter of if she’s there to slow the fallout or not. The fact that he asked her for a meeting, gave himself no chance to back out, is worrying and telling.

“A favour of my own.

“To be determined at a later date,” she continues and stares at him right back. It would make other men nervous, but it always seems to calm him down, reassure him in some way, even when she’s lying. “And with no limitations.”

He’s still staring.

When he looks away, glances past her shoulders, she knows he’s done. He nods.

“One exception: SI will still never make another weapon. And neither will I.” He looks at her again, but the intensity’s left his face.

So easy to read and still so very much a puzzle.

“Done. What’s your favour, Tony?”

“I need to learn to do what you do.”

She blinks. It’s so far from what she was expecting—ever expecting, least of all from him—that the reaction is completely unmodified or affected. A small part of her applauds him at the achievement.

“You want,” she says slowly, needs the clarification, “to become a Widow.”

She likes him. It surprised her at first, when she discovered herself smiling that first smile easier and without as much calculation than she’d planned. During her time at SI, she’d expected to deflect passes from him and his subordinates right and left. He’d been a tool, then, purposefully obnoxious and irreverent. But even through the pain and posturing, he had tried so earnestly that she found herself irritated with him when he couldn’t make that last hurdle for Pepper.

(She’d only realised later that that conversation and the strawberries had been Tony trying to jump, despite a broken leg and a certainty that he’d break his face in the attempt.)

She’d only liked him more in the weeks afterwards, in the months of consultation for SHIELD leading up to the Battle of New York, and even after. 

He was flash, sharp and quick, yes. But everything he did, from prodding Clint back to being Clint, to bringing dark chocolate caramel corn for her when he consulted with Fury, was done with intent and deliberate purpose. She doesn’t think she’s ever had anyone so off-handedly determined to befriend her before.

So. She likes him. And while she could do it—the years and steps are burned into her brain _пять шесть семь восемь_ as much as they whisper to her in the night _перезаряжай_ —she doesn’t– She doesn’t really want to do that. To him. To her littl– 

To him.

He waves her comment off with a hand. “No, no. The skintight suit would look ridiculous, and I’m too young for marriage.”

“No.” He takes a deep breath. His eyes are fixed on the tabletop.

“Natasha,” she controls the blink this time but he so very rarely uses her given name it’s a near thing, and isn’t he full of surprises this morning, “I’m surrounded by spies and assassins. SI has been infiltrated twice, once right up to the very top, and I had no idea.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, cocks her head meaningfully, deflecting and redirecting away from the clusterfuck that had been Stane, and he huffs a laugh.

“Oh, I knew _you_ were up to something; a redhead who can fight like that, who just _happens_ to show up while I was dying, and shortly after I was an _idiot_ and stopped responding to anything Agent sent my way? I knew you were something, probably SHIELD, but also possibly DOD, or maybe DOJ after the hearing thing, but you were not very inconspicuous. Also, I mean, if you were going to be a paralegal you would’ve done a better job of hiding the modeling ph– Anyway.” He slices a hand through the air as if trying to physically cut off his own string of thought.

“It happened, and it’s probably going to _keep_ happening. I don’t think my public and nonpublic interactions are going to endear me too much to certain people with certain valuable assets on the payroll who can do certain things. And the fact that the second incident got me away from imminent death by crossword puzzle is less important than that it happened in the first place.” His smile is sardonic and transient.

A deep breath, exhaled on a sigh.

“I need to learn how to do what you do, to be what you are. I can’t afford to be that vulnerable again.”

She waits, unsure if he’s going to clarify, or if that _was_ the clarification...

...but then again, she supposes it _is_ a clarification. 

She’s read Coulson’s notes, Potts’ statement of the SI plant in California, and even Tony’s own rambling story, painstakingly pieced together by Coulson after weeding out the complaints and contradictions.

If he’d handled his return from Afghanistan better, Stane would’ve been contained far earlier. And if he’d been a little bit more ruthless and precise down the line, Stane would’ve gone down far easier in that last fight.

Even the fight with Vanko in Monaco would’ve gone a lot smoother if a Widow had been fighting.

And he _is_ asking. That’s not something Tony does lightly.

She considers him. 

He doesn’t have the build for a Widow—truth be told, he’s almost perfect for a Soldier (and doesn’t that thought make her shiver)—but flexibility can be trained. So can compartmentalization. He already lies like he breathes.

But a Widow’s true skill—what they had to force a Soldier into—was the suppression of a moral quandary, of the self, in order to get the job done. It made her a good assassin. 

It made her a _great_ spy.

“You need to take time—eight months. And no one can know where you’re going.” She uncrosses and recrosses her legs.

She has something, possibly. She hates herself a little for even considering this path of action, but Fury _had_ told her she had discretion over their Ukrainian problem, and it’s not that far removed from her own original idea.

He considers her. “I can give you four.”

She shakes her head. No way could she do it in less than five, and that was pushing it.

“Six,” she counters.

“If you can spare me for a board meeting in the fifth month, I can get you six.”

She thinks. It’d be tight, but...

“When?”

“March 12.”

Thinks and rearranges some. Possible. But very tight. “Video conference only, and you tell no one why.”

He arcs an eyebrow. “And do _I_ get to know why?”

“No.” She stands to leave. It’s 0816. “But you will.”

* * *

Understandably, Virginia “Pepper” Potts is not pleased, but she allows that Tony hasn’t taken a single break or sabbatical since he inherited the company at 21. He might’ve taken extended weekends, and longer birthdays than most of SI’s employees, but true vacations were not something that Tony Stark did. Engineering and robotics conferences were about as close as he got.

Still, when Pepper calls her up to ask her _why_ Tony is taking a sabbatical, and refusing to talk about why it’s with Natasha Romanoff, Natasha knows Pepper well enough to give her, “he’s asking for a favour, and it’s something he actually needs.”

Pepper is not happy (the tone, stiff and just a little outraged, like she’d been at Stark’s birthday a year ago is enough without the words themselves), but she agrees that as long as he doesn’t miss the board meeting, there is no reason for her to stop him from taking the _sabbatical_. 

Natasha can practically hear her teeth grinding.

Happy starts to bring it up driving her back to Avengers Tower from a meeting at SHIELD NY, but she just stares at him in the rearview mirror and he swallows his words halfway through the sentence.

Rhodes is harder to assuage.

“No, I’m not telling you, Rhodey.”

“Listen, Romanoff,” he’s been patiently displeased most of the night, but he’s actually been mostly polite about it. It’s quaint.

“That’s my best friend. The last time he disappeared for months on end is one of the worst moments of my life.”

Emotional blackmail. As she said: quaint.

“Just let me know where he’s going, who he’s going to see, and what’s wrong with him.”

Ah, _that_ was it, then.

“Rhodey,” she smiles at him; he really is one of her favourites, “Tony’s not sick, and I’m not at liberty to discuss where he’s going. Tony trusts me, honeybunch; you should too.”

He’s frowning at her now. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to butter me up with Tony’s stupid nicknames, Romanoff. I know you’re sneakier than that, and I know that despite Tony trusting you, you have several other priorities that are probably higher up than him on your list. Tones is not known for his lack of trust-issues, in fact you and SHIELD both know very well about him and his trust issues, don’t you _Natalie_ , so telling me that he trusts you? Not as rousing an endorsement as you think.”

Well, that’s actually an arguable point. But.

“Rhodes.” She turns to face him fully, places her drink on the coffee table and curls her hands together in her lap. It doesn’t mean she’s more sincere, but even when people know she’s lying it seems to usually convince them otherwise. “If you don’t trust Tony to trust me, at least trust him to know his own mind. He asked me for a favour, and that’s what I’m trying to give to him. Despite my “priority list” and what you assume his place is on it, I am not acting in anything other than his interest right now, and I _am_ doing it at his direct request.”

She gives him a moment to think that over, picking up her glass and taking a sip.

“If you want to know more,” she stands and heads towards the elevator, “then I suggest you ask Tony.”

Quaint.

But also endearing.

* * *

Tony fidgets next to her, fiddling with the edges of his jacket, rolling with the motion as the limo passes over a set of trolley tracks.

It isn’t surprising. He’d always fidgeted next to her and now she’s sending him halfway across the world, practically blind.

“Ticket.” She slides the boarding pass over on the seat between them. It’s in his name—no reason for it not to be—and he looks it over, eyebrows raising when he notes the destination. 

“You’ll arrive at noon, but you’ll need to wait; your contact will meet you the following day, 0600 local time.”

He flips through the small packet of attached documents. “You’re not coming with me?”

“You’ll do everything she says,” she ignores the interruption because of course she isn’t coming with, “and if you have a problem with that, you need to tell me now; there will be no extraction until you’re done.”

He grits his teeth, but keeps reading. Tony’s never not liked knowing things. It’s a good policy to have, but he doesn’t have the expertise to drag information out of a non-digital target. 

Yet.

 _He’s probably going to hate that the most_ , she thinks, and then almost immediately smothers the flicker of regret. He doesn’t trust her, probably never will, but the loss of that potential shouldn’t bother her. 

Saving his life in 2010 was a mission, and one that needed doing. That they now have to create some form of trust from that betrayal has very little to do with the previous mission.

So she tells herself.

“And what will I be doing?” His eyes flick up towards her face before back down to the simple list of dos and don’ts she’s prepared.

“Need to know.” She pulls out an injection gun, presses it to his neck, and pulls the trigger before he even registers that she’s moved. His yelp is loud in the close confines of the car.

“What the hell, Romanoff?!”

The file is scattered on the floor where he’s dropped it and she gathers it up before setting it on the seat next to him calmly. He’s disbelieving and irritated, hand pressed against the injection site like it might still bleed.

“General inoculation for some lesser-known bugs you really don’t want to encounter where you’re going, and a time-release anti-viral. You can drink the water, but the taste will probably put you off.”

And she’s not lying. Completely.

The biodegradable tracker she just imbedded in his neck did indeed include a time-release anti-viral. Among other things.

“Hell, warn me next time, would you?” He checks his hand for blood.

She smiles.

“Sure, Tony.”

* * *

She drops him off at the airport and instructs Happy to take her back to the Tower. She could just as easily tell him she’d find her own ride back, that she had errands or was going to meet up with someone else, but that’s not what Natasha Romanov would do. 

Natasha would head back to SHIELD at this time and meet up with Clint to spar.

Natasha does so.

Natasha afterwards would check her email.

Natasha does so.

The simple email from j2Gd3547Fz32kLC.s12.5@noreply.com at exactly 12:40 is exactly what she was expecting.

_Package route and pickup time confirmed. Receipt on delivery?_

She replies with _Yes._ and waits another 23 hours for a followup email:

_Package delivered successfully._

Natasha finishes answering her email, sets up mail forwarding, and an out of office message. She goes to see Fury, and packs a kit.

The Black Widow boards a stealth fighter five hours later.

Sixteen hours after that, she’s parachuting under cover of darkness into a part of the world most people liked to pretend didn’t exist.

And three hours after that, the Black Widow is set up in a decrepit, blown out shell of a concrete structure, old and ignored, 1200 feet from a highly fortified nationalist base 140 km outside Kiev.

Tony’s tracker registers as 1243 feet in front of her, and 62 feet down.

* * *

“Wake up.”

He stands, hands at his sides, at the end of his cot. 

He’d already been awake, waiting for this order. It’s not hard; he’s received the same order for eight and a half weeks (maybe) at this point. It’s hard to be completely sure of the length of time he’s spent here (most of the first several weeks he has to hand wiggle and guess about because something they’d slipped into his food made all the days blend together like an oil slick, or the particular floating haze of opioids), but he knows it’s been at minimum a month, and at max... Well. 

There’s always the possibility his calculations are wrong. Three years _does_ seem a little excessive, even with all the holes in his memory.

“Assume the position.”

‘The position’, is facing the corner of his cell furthest from his cot, his head pressed into the space where the walls meet, his hands at hip level and as far from himself as he can get them. If he does it fast enough, he won’t be punished.

He’s gotten very good at being fast.

The screech of metal on rusted metal is familiar, but no one enters his cell this time, only a voice beckoning him, ordering him to turn around, to follow. He hears the unspoken ones: _do not speak unless directed to, do not question anything, do not hesitate._

There are others, each painfully learned: _do not run, do not scream, do not resist, do not hope._

Lessons from the last one are the most painful.

They lead him down his corredor, the only one they ever lead him down. Straight 120 feet, right, 20 feet, left, third left, second right. But then, not the first left. 

Nor the second.

An additional 50 feet and he starts to dread. Deviations in routine are never good. Repetition is good, provides safety and the ability to determine consequences and outcomes. Once they start changing the game, the rules change, too, and he has no way of knowing what the right answer is.

They lead him into a large, empty chamber (96 extra feet, and a right) with twenty-five other people sat at steel tables, guarded by handlers.

This is new.

* * *

Natasha watches Tony’s tracker with half an eye.

For the last eleven weeks the dot has helped her plot out parts of the frighteningly large complex. Although they’ve only directed him to, at most, 12% of the structure, the repetition has helped her guess at the width of the halls, and the turns in his trips help her understand the psychology of the building.

Tony’s own habit of pacing, what she assumes, is the walls of his cell lets her know it’s dimensions (four feet by seven feet) and that his cot is in the western corner, lengthwise against the long, southeast-facing wall. His door is on the southwestern wall, connected to a hallway that measures at minimum 120 feet, but is probably closer to 320.

She blinks as the tracker informs her he’s moving past the room they’ve led him to for the last three weeks, continuing on. Carefully sketching out the new route, she freezes when the signal does, just after a turn– _no, you idiot, don’t just stop at the doorway, don’t show emoti–_

The dot jumps forward, then stills. She holds her breath.

It shifts, pauses, then moves again, freely and at a diagonal for twenty-five feet before stopping again.

She breathes.

“Идиот, проявляй свои эмоции.”

She goes back to sketching out possibilities for this new room.

* * *

Enough repetition and he's gotten used to the orders—stand, use this knife, kill that, infiltrate here—because the other option if he doesn't comply is always worse. After a while, the lessons fall away and all he remembers the orders in his bones, snaps to them instinctively.

He hates that. Hates that he forgets being too slow to stand gets him standing on his toes with a noose around his neck all night. Hates that the first time he refused the knife, they’d used it on him, and dictated their actions to him anyway. He hates that the pause before he took the knife the second time earned him watching the prisoner be tortured to death for information he clearly didn’t have, watched while drugs held him immobile as a bureaucratic suit went from navy and white, to navy and red and red and red, while screams echoed and rang and rang and rang from concrete halls. He hates that he forgets all this, all of it, until his body remembers nothing but _stand, use the knife, kill that, infiltrate here_.

He hates the impersonality of it. They don't care that he's Tony Stark, and soon he doesn't care either.

* * *

“Ukraine is an independent state.”

“Україна має нез-”

Pain.

* * *

“The freedom I enjoy is a privilege.”

“Свобода, которой я насл-”

Pain.

* * *

“I shall fear nothing evil, for my Father guides me.”

“Я не буду боятися зла, бо мій батько-”

Pain.

* * *

“Прочитайте його вголос.”

“Під це гасло, яке виконувало суто ідеологічні функції і здебільшого просто використовувалося як політичне тавро, підганялися всі ідеологічні течії і політичні угруповання, які вважалися конкурентами правлячої партії у сфері «національного питання».

“З кінця 1920-х років, коли радянський націоналізм як адаптована форма російського націоналізму перетворився на ідеологію модернізації, термін «буржуазний націоналізм» перетворився на універсальне знаряддя у боротьбі з будь-якими виявами національної свідомості, культури, ідеологічними чи політичними напрямами, які не збігалися з державною ідеологією в галузі «національного питання» і могли (чи вважалося, що могли) загрожувати пануванню цієї ідеології або стати основою для сепаратистських тенденцій.”

“Хороша робота.”

* * *

The new lessons are taxing.

Hours of instruction and drills, and then brutal practicals for skills he’s expected to memorize quickly and without error.

He makes it as far as the fake “command post” structure—cardboard walls and pallets shored up with rusted I-beams and girders—before he gets shot in the back. The fact that the round is rubber doesn’t make the round half-embedded in his skin hurt less.

It’s nearly late-meal, he can tell, but he’s led back to the beginning again.

The first time, he’d been caught at the outer perimeter. The second, by the same guard that stopped him this time, but that encounter had concluded with a choke out and waking up two minutes later, dumped at the start again.

This next time, he gets at far as the command post and waits. Waits until he can see the guard, waits until the guard is turned away, then pounces.

A broken elbow will make anyone scream, but it’s hard to get the sound out without any air.

He looks down at the guard, arm bending the wrong way and feels something snarling inside him.

It’s not the first time.

The terminal inside is off-grid, with stupid-easy encryption. He has it unlocked in seconds, the data copied in less than that, and the hard drive wiped and purged all the way to the BIOS and beyond just after that. The machine dies, and he’s left staring into the reflection echoing in the old CRT monitor.

He doesn’t recognize the man in the reflection. 

He feels his face contort.

The man frowns.

He feels his face relax.

The man shows no emotion.

Iron Man rages.

* * *

"Він накинувся знову. Резюме обробок."

"Він найрозумніший з зв'язки, але ці чортові невдачі обходяться нам майже стільки ж часу, як то, що він стрибає вперед."

"Замовлення Boss '. Ми тримаємо його в програмі, ми тримаємо його запустити його, поки він не правий, або ми надсилають додому в формочках ".

"Так Так."

* * *

He wakes on the floor. 

His skin feels jittery and like electricity is running along it. He’s nauseated and lightheaded, and more than vaguely detached from reality.

Is he dreaming?

No, he’s not. He knows this feeling, but it’s so hard to think. 

He presses himself to sitting.

“Де ти?”

“I...”

Pain, a blow that snaps his head around, skitters over his skin and makes the nausea worse.

**“Де ти?”**

Right. He’s... not supposed to speak like that. Ранній урок.

“Ніде.”

“Що ти?”

“Зрозуміла неопределеної вартості.”

“Добре. Ми починаємо знову.”

* * *

He's woken with a kick that dumps him off the cot, and dragged out of his cell.

They don’t say a word, but he does his best to comply, to not make trouble, to not do anything that could possibly be seen as resisting. It’s worse when he resists. Even being off the drugs for a few weeks, it’s always worse when he resists.

Guards drag him down halls he's never seen before and the progression draws more and more people— _prisoners, trainees_ his mind hisses, noting body language and fear-tells and subservience and, from some, _far too much emotion to survive_ —before no more join them the last fifty feet from an external door. 

The dozen and a half of them are loaded onto three modified cargo 'copters and he has enough awareness to know he doesn't like where this is going. There's a crate in the back but none of the prisoners, trainees have weapons.

Someone's taking them either to be scrubbed ( _project canceled, J, dump everything_ ) or used as fodder.

He doesn’t want to die.

 _Survive, survive, survive,_ beats in his blood.

Instead, they're flown to the middle of a very large forest, and strapped with parachutes.

"Коробка містить достатню кількість їжі для одного, і GPS до місця зустрічі. Ви два тижні з цього місця."

The guard stares at them, perfect white teeth, excepting the one he’s missing. There’s an AS Val gripped in grimy, scarred hands. 

He wants it so badly, he can taste the scuffed paint.

“Якщо ви ще не в вісімнадцять днів, ми залишаємо без вас. Якщо ви приїдете по-друге, ми будемо стріляти в вас.”

A vicious grin.

"Не прибуває третя."

* * *

Natasha curses.

There are three choppers unloading supplies.

There have never before been three. Never before has Tony’s tracker moved up so high in the compound, either.

Something’s happening and she’s blind. If she’d had more time, she would’ve put a mic in his jaw, but twenty-two weeks ago she was running late and neglected to check her gift horse’s teeth.

She waits, breath bated, for seventy-two minutes. At seventy-four, prisoners start lining up around the choppers. At seventy-nine, she spots Tony.

At ninety, they begin loading the choppers with prisoners and at exactly ninety-seven minutes and fourteen seconds all three take off in formation.

Tony’s tracker quickly flies out of range.

Natasha runs out of curses in Russian and moves to German.

* * *

He would be afraid. Would _have_ been afraid, as well, staring down into the darkness of what he understands is unpopulated wilderness, but sees as only vast, explanseless black. 

Even if he dies, though, crushed on landing by opening this chute too late, or a failed ripchord, or sadism putting a bullet in his back before he is far enough from the rotors to pull the chord, he’ll at least be free from the half second after his feet leave the corrugated floor.

The AS Val shifts in his peripheral and he doesn’t wait. He leaps, foot pushing off from the edge of the open back, even as he feels the boot make contact with the back of his knee. 

He’s defenseless.

Falling without thrust.

For half a heartbeat—

—it feels like flying.

And then it only feels like staring into death.

* * *

The only good thing to come of those three choppers is the loss of a large number of personnel. She finds it far easier than it should be to sneak into the complex.

Unfortunately, the man she’s been waiting for has either left with them, or has yet to arrive. 

She plants bugs throughout the complex, anyway.

* * *

It’s like waking up from a hazy nightmare to someone trying to drown you.

Fun fact: He knows exactly what that feels like.

He hasn’t been this aware in months, and the fact that a panic attack is what killed off the fog in his brain has him bemused, irritated, and grudgingly thankful.

It feels like New York all over again.

It feels _nothing_ like New York.

He has enough experience working under extreme panic by now to be able to shove it aside and do the damn job, though.

The fall—00:00:02:49—has taken him far enough away from the chopper by now—assuming standard Mil Mi-17 operating under standard conditions with limited to no air movement—that he can deploy the chute without killing himself, and the Hip.

He wouldn’t care about the latter but for the former—and the fact that the damn thing has a crate he desperately needs to survive.

* * *

She was right about the size of Tony’s cell.

Not the cot, though. Seems that’s actually in the center of the room. Odd place for it, until she presses a hand against the frigid concrete and imagines sleeping with that to your back.

She underestimated the size of the bunker.

By a large margin.

* * *

Thankfully, most of it is unused.

* * *

Tony Stark doesn't like killing.

But Tony, the man with everything and nothing, knows that if you don't do to them first, they will definitely do to you later.

He watches the rest of the chutes deploy, starkly black against cityglow’d clouds if you’re looking, marks the crate in his mind, and heads there. If the others are _half_ as trained as he is, he needs the box.

It'll be his only bait.

* * *

He gets there first.

That or someone else had the same idea he has.

He starts setting up traps anyway, leaves the precariously balanced supply drop where it is and finishes his concealment shortly before the first shows up.

The target's incautious.

He wants to sigh.

The target falls to the snare trap far too easily. It's easier to slit the target's throat, remove the sprung trap and hide the body than he'd like.

Iron Man twinges in his chest. 

Tony tells him to shut up.

They haven't given him anything more technologically advanced than a 9mm, and even those they take away from him in a few short hours. They haven’t shown him anything resembling a cooking fire, let alone a forge. If they’d given him a flip phone, hell, a rotary phone, he could have hacked his way out of confinement, or engineered his way to a taser, or forged his way to another Mark I.

As it is, he has his fists, the training they shoved in his head, and a desire to live that was heat treated and cast in the sands of an unforgiving desert.

This is about survival. Iron Man should understand that, if anyone.

* * *

She takes two days to map out the complex and plant bugs, sneaking out on spider’s silk when she’s done.

No one knows she’s been here.

Tony’s tracker hasn’t come back in range of the receiver when she checks it.

* * *

The next target is more cautious, but his cautiousness costs him speed and a third target shows up while the second is casing the crate.

They both die of blood loss before the fourth shows up, but the fourth shows up as he's trying to hide their bodies.

It's a fair fight this time, and Iron Man is soothed, even when he has to snap an elbow, rip off an ear, and slowly chokes the fourth to death with his bare hands.

 _Survive, survive, survive,_ beats in his blood.

He waits through two days and ten other targets before deciding that he can finally move. The shallow stream he buried the bodies next to won't keep predators away for long, and if the last four won't hunt the crate down, he'll leave them to themselves. 

They might just be too dumb to track the crate anyway.

Or too cowed.

* * *

He discovers he's wrong when he opens the crate.

One of them, at least, is smarter than he is.

He nearly doesn't survive that encounter, but at least there are alcohol wipes and antibiotics in the supplies, as well as just barely enough suture. It's not clean—not Yinsen's work—but it'll do.

He shoves what he needs in the included sack, ignores the red herring of a radio (insides reworked _just so_ and he delicately sets it forty feet from himself and the crate), and sets off north.

* * *

Two days in, and he's utterly frustrated.

Yes, the GPS has an internal tracking unit, but the satellite uplink is a closed geosynchronous orbit. It talks to nothing but the handheld unit he's got, doesn't even appear to have any other transceivers but the narrow band he's on and is, at his best guess, from the early 90s. 

It's impossible to send out a rescue signal with this.

It also appears to be leading him in circles.

* * *

Five days later, he goes to sleep, and nearly doesn't wake up on the sixth.

He's taken to sleeping in trees, but a rock to the temple is still a rock to the temple and he goes down, hard.

That fight is viscous, bloody, and when he rolls off of this corpse, shaking from more than just pain, he _feels_ something, and it's not something he's felt in a long while.

He throws up water and bile, then strips the corpse of anything useful and drags it off.

By the time he's re-bandaged and disinfected himself again, the shaking's nearly stopped and he forces two of the dried ration bars down his throat.

He wishes, selfishly, that he hadn’t woken up. The haze of drugs and conditioning was better than this.

* * *

Seven days later, he's navigated himself to the rendezvous point (after ditching the GPS and navigating by starlight) and used up the rest of the antibiotics.

There's a cluster of tents and a helo and he limps back there with a grim satisfaction and a grimmer renewed sense of determination. He knows about where he is now.

Kiev. He's near Kiev.

* * *

Nothing moves at the base for another long, insomniatic dozen days.

Then–

One helicopter, flying low. In daylight.

Tony’s tracker is active.

* * *

Dawn breaks as they’re unloading the last chopper.

She’s only seen Tony— _deduction_ , she’s hoping it’s Tony, it matched the tracker’s movements—brought out on a stretcher, limp and struggling.

The thin thread of hope she’d been casually nursing dies as the last guard disembarks.

No other prisoners returned.

A two week mission.

She knows what this is.

Natasha, favour or no, hates herself just a little more.

* * *

_“Вы никогда не будете свободны от Красной комнате.”_

* * *

The metal-bitter taste is back in his mouth.

When he wakes, he knows that he’s spared the beating only so he doesn’t incur further injury.

His wounds are healed, but tender, and the ~~pause~~ error he’d made in drills this morning had incurred the first injury.

He knows—should know?—that his food has drugs in it that make him pliable, but it doesn’t matter ~~as much as it should~~. The error was made.

A day later they put him back in drills.

He doesn’t pause again.

 

* * *

His ears are ringing.

Everything aches.

His throat is dry and the sweat dripping down his head and into his eyes makes the edges of his vision blurry, but if he reaches up to wipe it away, he will more than likely lose the knife.

“Знову.”

He flips the knife.

Again.

* * *

His head pounds.

The drugs are gone, he knows.

He embraces the headache.

* * *

That night, as he sleeps, something explodes.

* * *

Everything’s loud and his head still hurts, but there’s concrete dust everywhere, the door of his cell has broken down into a mangled heap, and a guard lies, wide-eyes to the ceiling, with a—

_fucking are you kidding me that **gun**_

—AS Val across his chest.

He takes the gun.

It feels just about as perfect as he thought it would.

* * *

When Natasha makes a promise, she keeps it.

* * *

Most of everyone is running past his cell, and he is keen to get away from the destruction erupting from somewhere to his right.

He turns and runs for the second floor.

* * *

Natasha should stay back, detonate the main charge and then comb the wreckage to see if she could find Tony’s body.

She is compromised.

She sets a timer on the main charge, and then runs in.

Fury assigned her to this for a reason.

Compromised or not.

* * *

The early morning progresses into day and then back into twilight and full darkness again before Tony meets up with Natasha.

She is dirt-smeared, her hair pulled back slick, and it looks as though she might have been caught in the final blast that had taken out the northwest corner of the compound. He knows she is ambidextrous, but the gun in her left hand is not joined by one in her right.

She’s no less a threat.

* * *

It had been a shock to nearly fall onto Tony as she was about to let reality steal the last of her hope. He’d defied death before, but surely mortals only get one resurrection story.

Not Tony, it seems.

The left side of his face is a mask of blood, his right shoulder looks obviously burned and his feet are bare.

Whoever was in charge of grooming him was a few days behind, and they’d decided to babyface him.

The rough stubble would be more at home on Clint.

“Stark.”

* * *

“Stark.”

She looks relieved.

Well, that’s just stupid.

_Does she not know I know she sold me out?_

He’d had a long long time to think about how _convenient_ it was that he’d been picked up how he was and after Natasha’s careful instructions. Either Natasha had sold him out (to what end he has no idea, but if it’s one of Fury’s plans he might never know), or SHIELD had a mole (a not impossible possibility, given the size of the organization, and the fickleness of human character. He’d be more surprised if it _wasn’t_ infiltrated by at least three somethings.)

Regardless, it was her hands he’d put himself in.

“We need t-”

* * *

Natasha almost didn’t see the first blow.

She did not dodge it.

Her ears are ringing from the shot, a firm strike to her solar plexus that steals her breath and slams her head into the concrete wall behind her. It hurts, but she is a Black Widow, and the second and third strikes don’t connect.

Tony’s expression doesn’t change.

* * *

Two days later, dawn:

“Come on, Tony, just a bit further.”

His breathing is ragged, pained and shallow despite his best efforts, and her cautious warnings. He’s going to make himself faint and she is going to scowl at him, curse her lack of camera, and then continue to haul his ass across the border.

“You... said...that a’...hour...ago....”

“And I’ll keep saying it as long as you keep dawdling.”

A pained breath is his only reply.

“Stark, I’m not carrying you fifty kilometers.”

“Are- you- _kidding-_...” Their progress stops as he bends over to cough. And keeps coughing. And coughing.

It ends when he holds his breath, teeth clenched and a hand pressed firmly over his ribs. She waits at his side, taking the free moment to scan their surroundings.

“You’re in luck, Tony. We’re closer than I thought; only about twenty kilometers to go.”

His breath escapes in a whine.

* * *

They make it, hobbling, back to the rendezvous point the following day.

Tony wants a chili cheesedog.

Natasha wants a bath.

* * *

The penthouse is large, empty, and bright. Light from the mid-morning sun is refracting through the raindrops clinging to the glass, scattering across the floor and his shins in arcs of colour. Underneath his hand, the glass is a crisp coolness rather than an ache-inducing bitter cold. Everything’s so clean and precise that it feels like he’s stuck in a dream sometimes, unable to wake up.

The ache in his chest has nothing to do with his ribs.

* * *

Shouldn’t he feel _more_ safe, _more_ relaxed, just— _more_?

It feels like looking at the world through distorted glass; sometimes the image is clear, but only if he looks at it just right, only if he doesn’t try to make it work, only if he doesn’t look with both eyes.

The lights aren’t too bright, they just are.

The sounds of traffic aren’t too loud, they just are.

Food isn’t too rich, it just is.

Until Natasha comes up behind him unexpectedly and then it’s too bright too loud too much.

Afghanistan wasn’t this hard.

* * *

“You have to give it time, Tony.”

She should have the answers she has _done this_.

She-

“You _did_ this to me, why can’t you _**fix it**_?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

* * *

He no longer flinches.

He’s not adapting as fast as she’d like, though.

Maybe this part wasn’t something she could replicate? She’s never tried before, even after the hours and hours and years she’s spent deconstructing the process. The process as it was done to her was brutal, efficient, and–most importantly–administered from the earliest years she can remember.

Tony has lived more of his life with his own autonomy than she has.

Tony cannot know exactly what she’s doing, or he will colour and distort the results.

Tony is her friend, and ultimately, she is compromised. She cannot do him a lasting injury.

Not even for himself.

* * *

She enters the room and his balance shifts.

He’s aware of her, and not even looking in her direction.

It’s been difficult on him, on her. Per her instructions, no one has been allowed in the penthouse since they arrived. No one greeted them at the airport, and only a small contingent of SHIELD personnel saw to their injuries. 

While she is aware that this is continuing his captivity, that she’s taking somewhere he’d created for himself, his own safe space, and perverting it with this experience, there is no other way for her to finish his conditioning.

The Ukrainian separatists had been not indelicate, but they lacked the finesse of the Red Room, and their goal had been a powerful corporate sleeper, not an infiltrator of the highest standard.

It’s possible that she’d left him there too long, that instead of priming him to be malleable, he had been set and cast. The reality is that he might be more Soldier than Widow.

Not a complete loss.

But not the desired outcome.

“Идите, Тошка.

* * *

His hair is long, lopsided, and scraggly. It curls under his jaw, over his eyes, makes it easy to hide his gaze in.

His jaw is rough, unshaven for however many days since the hellhole had exploded. He can’t remember. Time is still... fuzzy.

He stares at himself in the mirror and doesn’t recognize his reflection.

_—a CRT monitor, Iron Man rages, BIOS screen—_

He pulls his hair back with one hand, digs for one of Pepper’s hair ties with another. It’s not quite long enough for him to pull it all back and have it stay, (his bangs are long, but not quite that long) but he no longer looks like he’d forgotten a map in the Andes.

He looks for his razor. Can’t find his silver straight razor. Brow furrows in a frown.

He finds the electric easily enough.

Shaving feels foreign, but his hands haven’t forgotten the motions.

* * *

He feels hollow on the inside. Like a cathedral, marble and unfeeling, gaping and cavernous.

As fragile as spun sugar.

* * *

(Or maybe that’s the world around him; delicate like crystal and china, beautiful things that he’s afraid to touch because he doesn’t understand the ways to put such materials back together again. His skin feels too tight and too loose at once and he doesn’t know where he fits anymore.)

* * *

Coffee doesn’t taste as appetizing as it really really goddamn should. Clint had once jabbed at him, good-naturedly, at the size of his liquor collection, but that’s only because the good stuff–the coffee–was kept locked and sealed behind that one Mondrian he’s bought on a whim to piss Pepper off and then fell inordinately in love with.

It tastes... _wrong_. Too flat and dulled, bitter but muddy, like no one had changed the filter in too long.

If he thinks about this, his fists will clench around the mug until he forces himself to think of something else.

He switched to the plain, sturdy white ceramic ones his second morning back.

* * *

Sometimes, he waits for the blow. He knows it’s not coming, that he will never have to live with the expectation again, but like an itch just out of reach, too far below the skin, he _aches_ with the anticipation of it.

He knows it’s not coming, but....

At least, back there, things made sense.

No, that’s stupid.

* * *

He knows it doesn’t make sense, he knows about brainwashing and captivity and dehumanization. He’s read all the books he could get his hands on about captivity when he was recovering from his first bout, and then did a refresher course after the thing with Loki and Clint.

He knows that the only thing that makes him _think_ it makes sense is the brain’s own stubborn determination to adapt to absolutely anything for survival.

Nothing there made sense; they just told his brain that it should.

* * *

(He still waits for the blow, still turns corners, without an escort, and anticipates being brought forcibly to heel. He still wakes with a jolt, anticipating a boot heel or icy water or a command in a language he now speaks that he hadn't understood a year ago. He still knows instantly when someone else–Natasha, because no one else is allowed in Stark Tower–enters the same room as him. When he wakes he still expects to see concrete.)

* * *

He’s snatched the object out of the air before he registers that it’s headed straight for his head, before he registers that it’s a knife.

The living room had been silent–

_It’s always silent_

–and he hadn’t heard anyone coming.

The lights cut and his emotions numb, falling away like the dusk fast approaching, muddled reds from the setting sun eating colours and deepening the pitch of the shadows.

The second object he instinctively knows not to touch.

His instincts are proven right when it explodes into smoke and light against the window behind him.

Flashbangs are brutal, even when you’re not facing them directly.

He coughs through the smoke.

An attack from his left sets his teeth rattling, but he blocks the strike to his kidneys, locks a joint, kicks out at a knee.

Hears “Що ти?”

And his heart freezes.

* * *

Natasha watches the screens as Tony falters.

She had argued with Fury, _and_ Coulson about this course of action. It was too uncertain. Tony Stark did not and never had reacted to things in expected ways and nearly half a year of dehumanization, torture, and neuro-suppressants did not make his actions any easier to predict.

But she has been overruled.

_“The world has already been too long without it’s Golden Avenger, Romanoff.” Fury said._

_And then sighed, “Besides, I think if Rogers hears ‘he’s on sabbatical’ one more time, he’ll wreck my damn helicarier.”_

This is cruel, though. The psychological element was overkill when they only needed to test his combat readiness.

The mild hallucinogenic in the smoke, combined with the brutal use of Hopak was just asking for a flashback.

They were setting him up to fail.

* * *

“Що ти?”

He doesn’t answer.

Pain.

* * *

“Що ти?”

He. He is—

* * *

“Зрозуміла неопределеної вартості,” crackles through the speakers in a choked voice.

It crackles along the back of her neck like static.

She’s so compromised.

* * *

“Добре. Ми починаємо знову.”

He lets the next blow fall, and the next.

If he fights back, it will be worse–

_“Stark, I’m not carrying you fifty kilometers.”_

He’s not...

* * *

“– _ust me_ on this, Coulson, if you don’t get him into detox, if he hallucinates the full dehumanization process, you won’t have an infiltrator, you’ll have a doll!”

Coulson stares at her for another long second before turning to the medical tech standing near the door. “Get Stark out of there and into quarantine. Keep him–,”

Half the cameras go dead.

Natasha turns just in time to watch one of the tactical team go crashing through plate glass and take a header out the window.

Coulson turns back to her. “I think it’s safe to say he’s not remembering the dehumanization stage.”

* * *

He is not there.

_ “Що ти?” _

He’s not in Kiev.

_ “Хто ти?” _

He’s...

_** “من أنت؟” ** _

No, he’s not there, either.

_ “أنت؟- т-и--?” _

“Я железный человек.”

* * *

Natasha walks carefully amongst the ruined livingroom. Through some small miracle, a great deal of skill, and a fair amount of sheer dumb luck, none of the bodies she steps around will require burial.

Tony is dangerously close to the remnants of the shattered plate-glass, though, his back pressed against the whole window on his right, his left shoulder blotting out a small section of the city lights. She knows he’ll be tracking her progress, but the fact that nothing had come flying at her means that the drugs had probably worn off by now.

Or this is a lucid phase.

She carefully steps over a body with a dislocated shoulder, missing half the items on her tac vest, and with a rapidly swelling ring finger.

She really hopes this isn’t just a lucid phase.

His hair whips about, obscuring his downturned face.

A sharp ache settles in under her heart. 

She’d done it, knowing what the outcome of this was going to be, but it still hurts. She knows only from observance what that innocence was like. The Red Room had found her too early for her knowledge to be emplerical, her job too ruthless for second hand. This, though... Even after Afghanistan, he’s had a bit of that innocence, hidden in his smile. Though he’d asked, nearly begged, it feels perverse to have destroyed that piece of him. He’ll never be vulnerable like that again, never _not_ watch all the entrances and exits, but at the same time...

He’ll never be vulnerable like that, ever again.

“Stark?”

His head lifts up.

* * *

He is tired.

He aches in multiple places in multiple ways. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone—talking is exhausting. Existing is exhausting, but he’s too fiercely attached to flipping the bird to multiple groups of people to give that up.

He rotates his left wrist, tries to ignore the pebbled glass digging its way into his forearm. His right arm is oddly numb from the shoulder down in a way that probably means it would hurt like a bitch tomorrow. Thankfully, resting both forearms on his knees relieves some of the strain on his lower back where he’d taken a club blow.

Natasha hadn’t been trying to hide her trek across the living room, and he’s watched her progress with a detached sort of exhaustion. In fact, the unconscious body she’d just stepped over is probably the bastard responsible for his sore back.

* * *

“It’s Tony, Nat. We’ve been over this.”

She hadn’t expected him to speak.

“Sorry about all this.” His left hand makes a vague motion that she’s sure was meant to encompass the destruction around them. He sighs and leans his head back against the window.

“Why do we keep destroying _my_ stuff? Can’t we destroy _your_ stuff for a change?”

“You don’t want to destroy my stuff, Tony,” she says cautiously, skirting closer. “If you destroy my stuff, you’d still have to clean it up and replace it, but then Fury would get involved, too.”

“There is that.”

Silence falls.

A beat.

* * *

Part of him wants to tell her that he knows. 

Tony Stark would do it.

Iron Man probably wouldn’t.

Tony.... He hasn’t decided yet.

He’s always known not to trust Fury, but this is a new low. It takes a certain kind of dick to dick over your own allies. Or not. That man was as ‘for the greater good’ as you could get, and Tony knows he’s not, never has been, and now never will be ‘the greater good.’

The knowledge doesn’t even hurt anymore.

He knows what he is, what his role is: he’s a tool, a sharp instrument. He’s the one that makes the calls no one else will consider, and then bear the payment for it. He is a bolverk, evil done in the name of good, so that good doesn’t have to suffer for the choices that fate forces upon the world.

“We should probably get these guys to a medic.” He lets his head fall forward, brushes wayward strands of hair out of his eyes.

Natasha’s silent for a long moment before she agrees.

* * *

He only has two weeks before he telecoms the board and he still feels hollowed out most of the time. Feelings are returning in spurts and jumps, like electrical signals through a shoddily done soldering job.

He looks up at Natasha and her passive face, and wonders if she's always looked this sad.

* * *

(Thank god his hands remember the motions by rote, his mouth speaking the way it should if he just stops thinking so hard.)

* * *

It’s easier some days than others.

When he finally had the window replaced, workers stealthily installing it in the middle of the night per Natasha’s restrictive instructions, it was a bad day. The thought of changes happening without his direct supervision, of someone inside his space without his oversight, set him to the edge of his awareness for the rest of the day. 

He nearly puts a knife through Natasha’s shoulder.

But the next day, after everything– after _he_ had settled, it was easier. The world was slowly returning to normal.

* * *

(He still can’t sleep in the too-soft bed. Just like after Afghanistan, he takes to sleeping on a hard, fold-out cot. It makes the nightmares harder to shake, cool cave walls fragmented between and around icy damp concrete, but at least he can fall asleep. When he sleeps with his bed between him and the door, the cot hidden on the floor, and a sheathed knife in his hand, he can almost trick himself into ‘safety’ enough to sleep.)

* * *

He doesn't know if he hates Natasha or not.

He knows he trusts her implicitly.

Mostly, he guesses, he’s just numb.

* * *

“He’s stalled out.”

Natasha doesn’t turn from the monitors.

“He’s regaining his equilibrium.”

Fury huffs beside her. “Widow, it took him all of a business week to recover and shut down SI’s weapons division after his three months in Afghanistan.”

She hates it when he does this; forces her to counter pathetic attempts at arguments so she can feel better about something.

“That was only three months, not five. And Raza only wanted weapons. Pavlychko wanted his soul.”

Silence beside her.

“You let me do this for a reason, Nick.”

“That reasons still stands.”

* * *

It’s driving him insane.

Waiting.

Nothing’s happened in five days.

Natasha’s gone more often than not now, and with JARVIS on forced shutdown, and her restrictions about his movements and visitors and exercise and sleeping and–

Had he ever really escaped? Or did he just rescue himself into another captivity?

* * *

He _is_ regaining his equilibrium. She can see it. She knows it, intimately, can see the reflections of herself and, recently, of Clint in his movements. His decisions have more agency, less movement that is defined by expected behaviors.

It’s frustrating, though, because Fury is partially right; Stark is such a stubborn bastard that she’d expected him to be past this stage by now.

* * *

She should remember that Tony moved on Tony’s time.

* * *

He’s done. Incensed. 

She’s left him alone for seven days now, he has nothing to do, nowhere to go.

There is _nothing_ here!

He knows where all the security cameras are, and he slips by them and into the shadows of the emergency stairwell without disturbing a one of them.

His hands start shaking after the first set of stairs.

By the third, his breathing is ragged.

At the fifth he’s forced to sit down before he breaks his neck.

What’s happening to him? He can’t go down his own fucking emergency stairwell now? He’s better than this, _he’s better than this!_

“Я железный человек,” he growls. He's a fucking Avenger.

He hauls himself to his feet. If it takes him an hour, if he has to _crawl_ , he’s doing this.

* * *

“–should be cleared for field duty next week,” Fury responds.

“I honestly expected him to push for sooner,” Natasha smiles.

“He’s a–,”

Natasha’s phone buzzes in her pocket.

Fury pulls his out of his coat at the same time.

“Shit,” she breathes, the same moment Fury commands, “Go.”

* * *

The sterile lab never looked so inviting.

It’s cold, and slightly dusty, but the dust covers come off of his workbench quickly enough.

He spreads a hand over the haptic glass for a moment and breathes in the smell. Glass, oil, the heady smell of ozone as electronic current, cool cement.

Home.

He taps a pattern into the glass.

“Time to wake up, boys.”

* * *

She dashes from the helipad on the roof down the stairs as fast as she dares.

He’s nearly as deadly as she is now, though without the years of training to reinforce it. But if he’s booked, if he’s had a relapse—

“Good afternoon, Agent Romanoff.”

She freezes five feet into the penthouse suite, relaxes her posture. Pulls her phone out and dials Fury directly.

“It’s fine, Director. The project is no longer stalled.”

She hangs up after he acknowledges her report.

“Hello, JARVIS.”

* * *

“Sir, might I just say that I’m not sure that particular hairstyle becomes you.”

“You mean I don’t look like a harlequin novel hero? Crushing my dreams here, J.”

“Dreadfully sorry, Sir. Should I call your publicist and enquire about modeling jobs in recompense?”

The conversation pauses naturally even before she rounds the corner.

“Probably not, buddy. Daddy’s.... It’s.... Not really safe right now.”

“.... For you, Sir?”

A sigh. “No, JARVIS.”

Another beat. “Is this similar to the aftermath of Afghanistan, Sir?”

“Yeah. Yeah, J, it’s like that.”

“Very well, Sir. Agent Romanoff wishes to see you.”

She blinks.

“Come in, Natasha.”

She pushes through the door.

She wasn’t expecting it, but the sight of blue schematics filling the air is at once comforting, and concerning. Tony does some of his best work in emotionally turbulent times. He also does some of his most dangerous.

“You’re not authorized to be on this floor.”

He gives her a long look in response. It’s weighted, but almost waiting, like he’s evaluating her, but the last bit of data, of confirmation hasn’t played out just yet.

Tony is only ever unsure of how other people will react to his decisions.

“JARVIS, Blackout Protocol.”

“Indeed, Sir. Blackout Protocol initiated.”

The ghostly outline of an Iron Man helmet fades out of existence behind him. Reflections tell her that the windows behind her have also gone dark.

They stare at each other for a long moment.

Tony breaks the silence first.

“I know.”

She watches him.

“I should thank you, I really should,” he continues. “But I also desperately want to jump in the Mark V and– do things that probably would make me unfit for the Avengers.”

“I don’t know if part of this was designed so I’d trust you, or if that was just a by-product of the forced confinement your specialized knowledge brought about.” He rises slowly from the stool he’d been sitting on.

“I do know I can’t quite hate you for it, after what I read about the Red Room.”

Her breath falters.

“I’m a hacker, Natasha.” His smile is self-depreciating. Ugly. “I hack.”

“But I need you to understand that it worked,” he explains. “That instead of being Pavlychko’s corporate spy, I’m your spy, in a corporate suit. Or, I guess, Fury’s, since he initiated this op.”

“The weaponized hallucinogen I could have done without, though. You’re lucky it firmed my resolve, opened my eyes. I could have been stuck back in Afghanistan.”

He stepped closer to her.

“I’m very angry at you right now, Tasha.”

He sighs and steps forward again until he can rest his chin on her shoulder. She forces herself to not tense up, to keep her breaths slow and measured.

“But you did exactly as I asked, even if I was an idiot and had no idea what I was actually asking for. I could hate you for my own ignorance, but that’s pretty petty, and I’m trying not to do that.”

He drops his forehead onto her shoulder and it takes a beat for her to realize the invitation for what it is. She cards her hands through his hair.

“I just don’t know how to not be empty anymore, Tasha.”

“Yeah,” she mumbles back. “You’ll get used to it.”

* * *

It works.

He can lie and tell the truth, and he sees when the truth people tell isn't theirs. Tony Stark comes back from a sabbatical, fresh and ready to start the new Stark Communications branch that has Google growling about market shares, and Tony can read intent in a shift in posture.

He still doesn't know if he hates Natasha or not.

* * *

The Board buys it. 

He has no idea how.

He feels like a marionette, a doll with perfect little strings that dance when he jiggles them.

He’s not sure who’s holding the strings. (For a bit he thinks it might be Fury, but if it is, the Spy’s Spy is playing the longest game Tony has ever seen.)

When he tells Natasha, she looks at him somberly for a beat, then nods slowly, contemplatively.

“The strings were always there, Tony. Now you can see them.”

* * *

(Fuck, she’s right; like his father, like Stane, were anything other than puppeteers, masters at pulling his strings? He’s been dancing on the end of a stick his whole life.)

* * *

The next three months she stays with him near constantly. It’s refreshing to know that someone could take him down before he crawled his delusional ass inside a suit. He doesn’t have a break, though.

Oh, he wakes up several times shouting in Ukrainian—or Russian, when he dreams and dares to fight back. Natasha talks him down enough times that one night she follows in his footsteps after a late night Star Trek marathon. She just raises an eyebrow at him—from _his_ bed!—when he gapes at her.

He does sleep more soundly after that.

* * *

After two months of joking and hanging and living inside each other’s space, Tony turns to her and tells her that he thinks he’s ready.

Natasha pauses for one long, excruciating moment before nodding slowly.

She thinks he’s ready, too.

* * *

“Sugar pie! Honey bunch!”

Tony strides over to Rhodey quickly, arms outstretched.

“Oh my god,” Rhodey mutters, the hand not holding a bag firmly planted over his face.

“You know that I love you,” Tony tells him with a wide grin. Behind him, Natasha’s fighting off a smile, lips pressed firmly together.

“Stop. What are you doing, that wasn’t funny the–,”

“I can help myself!”

Rhodey fights the grin even as he knows it’s a lost cause. It’s just good to see Tony this happy. He’d been worried about Tones for a while, after New York.

But _this_ Tony... He wasn’t tan, his hair was a bit longer that Rhodey was used to seeing, but... he no longer looked harried. Those two months after his friend has flown a nuclear warhead through a portal into outer space, he would have sworn to anybody who asked that Tony was going to pull another post-Afghanistan type of obsessive binge.

This Tony doesn’t look desperate.

“I love you and nobody else,” Tony tells him, arms now wrapped around his shoulders. He has the stupidest, shittiest grin on his face, cocking his head in an absurd parody of flirting. He even bats his goddamn eyes.

“I will rescind every overture of friendship I have ever made, you gigantic _dork_.”

“In and out of my life, you come and you–” he cuts off with a muffled laugh when Rhodey shoves a hand in his face.

“For the love of all that explodes, Tony Stark, if you don’t stop reciting sixties love ballads I will not be responsible for the events that ensue,” he declares and shoves his best friend away with a wider grin.

“But honey bunch, I can’t help myself; I’m tied to your apron strings,” Tony shrugs, with that same shit-eating grin.

Rhodey sighs, shakes his head and smiles. “I’ve missed you, you asshole.”

“Yeah?” Tony asks, still smiling. “Well, let’s see about upgrading your dependence, a little.”

He catches Natasha Romanoff smiling at them as they head down to the workshop. Rhodey hasn’t know her very long–or very much–but he has never seen a smile like that on her face.

He’s relieved; someone else thinks Tony’s going to be okay.

* * *

* * *

When she calls in her favour, he blinks.

He hasn't forgotten their deal. That thing he owes her at some indeterminate future date has sat lodged behind his breast for eleven months now, but he does as she asks and nudges and hints and talks to Fury and leaves behind ideas that will germinate in a mind that always thinks _Stark's up to something_ but never bothers with _Stark is leading me to something_ , even after his eight months and Project Phoenix.

And so Clint Barton is captured for two weeks by a bunch of assholes who worshiped at the altar of evil but had never actually met the guy, and certainly hadn’t drunk the koolaid. And then the second part of Natasha's favour is called in and Iron Man helps Widow and Cap break him out and Barton's laid up with stress fractures for six weeks with a strained spinalis thoracis and strict orders to _not move from this bed, Mr Barton_.

And so misses out on what turns out to be a very large clusterfuck that Cap, Natasha, and SHIELD get themselves ass deep into.

Natasha's a sneaky little devil.

Tony grins when he reads the news reports, even as he and JARVIS backup and squirrel away everything they can get their servers on.

* * *

 

Three weeks later, Steve Rogers shows up on his doorstep and his world twists once again.


	2. All the Translations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All the translations in the fic.

Tony’s own habit of pacing, what she assumes, is the walls of his cell lets her know it’s dimensions (four feet by seven feet) and that his cot is in the western corner, lengthwise against the long, southeast-facing wall. His door is on the southwestern wall, connected to a hallway that measures at minimum 120 feet, but is probably closer to 320.

She blinks as the tracker informs her he’s moving past the room they’ve led him to for the last three weeks, continuing on. Carefully sketching out the new route, she freezes when the signal does, just after a turn– _no, you idiot, don’t just stop at the doorway, don’t show emoti–_

The dot jumps forward, then stills. She holds her breath.

It shifts, pauses, then moves again, freely and at a diagonal for twenty-five feet before stopping again.

She breathes.

_“Idiot, do not show emotion.”_ “Идиот, проявляй свои эмоции.” 

She goes back to sketching out possibilities for this new room.

* * *

Enough repetition and he's gotten used to the orders—stand, use this knife, kill that, infiltrate here—because the other option if he doesn't comply is always worse. After a while, the lessons fall away and all he remembers the orders in his bones, snaps to them instinctively.

He hates that. Hates that he forgets being too slow to stand gets him standing on his toes with a noose around his neck all night. Hates that the first time he refused the knife, they’d used it on him, and dictated their actions to him anyway. He hates that the pause before he took the knife the second time earned him watching the prisoner be tortured to death for information he clearly didn’t have, watched while drugs held him immobile as a bureaucratic suit went from navy and white, to navy and red and red and red, while screams echoed and rang and rang and rang from concrete halls. He hates that he forgets all this, all of it, until his body remembers nothing but _stand, use the knife, kill that, infiltrate here_.

He hates the impersonality of it. They don't care that he's Tony Stark, and soon he doesn't care either.

* * *

“Ukraine is an independent state.”

_Ukr: “Ukraine has an ind-”_ “Україна має нез-” 

Pain.

* * *

“The freedom I enjoy is a privilege.”

_Russ: “Freedom, which I enj-”_ “Свобода, которой я насл-” 

Pain.

* * *

“I shall fear nothing evil, for my Father guides me.”

kr: “I shall fear no evil, for my dad-”“Я не буду боятися зла, бо мій батько-” 

Pain.

* * *

_Ukr: “Read it aloud.”_ “Прочитайте його вголос.” 

_Ukr: “Under this slogan, which served a purely ideological function and was mostly used as a political brand, all ideological currents and political groups, which are considered competitors of the ruling party in the ‘national question.’”_ “Під це гасло, яке виконувало суто ідеологічні функції і здебільшого просто використовувалося як політичне тавро, підганялися всі ідеологічні течії і політичні угруповання, які вважалися конкурентами правлячої партії у сфері «національного питання»." 

_"Ukr: “Since the late 1920s, when Soviet nationalism as an adapted form of Russian nationalism has become the ideology of modernization term ‘bourgeois nationalism’ has become a universal tool in the fight against any manifestations of national identity, cultural, ideological or political areas that do not coincide with state ideology in the ‘national question’ and could (or thought they could) threaten the dominance of ideology or form the basis for separatist tendencies."_ “З кінця 1920-х років, коли радянський націоналізм як адаптована форма російського націоналізму перетворився на ідеологію модернізації, термін «буржуазний націоналізм» перетворився на універсальне знаряддя у боротьбі з будь-якими виявами національної свідомості, культури, ідеологічними чи політичними напрямами, які не збігалися з державною ідеологією в галузі «національного питання» і могли (чи вважалося, що могли) загрожувати пануванню цієї ідеології або стати основою для сепаратистських тенденцій.” 

_Ukr: “Good.”_ “Хороша робота.” 

* * *

[...]

* * *

_“He lashed out again. Resume the treatments.”_ "Він накинувся знову. Резюме обробок." 

_“He’s the smartest of the bunch, but these damn setbacks are costing us almost as much time as what he jumps ahead.”_ "Він найрозумніший з зв'язки, але ці чортові невдачі обходяться нам майже стільки ж часу, як то, що він стрибає вперед." 

_“Boss’ orders. We keep him in the program, we keep him running it until it’s right, or we get sent home in tins.”_ "Замовлення Boss '. Ми тримаємо його в програмі, ми тримаємо його запустити його, поки він не правий, або ми надсилають додому в формочках ". 

_“Yeah, yeah.”_ "Так Так." 

* * *

He wakes on the floor. 

His skin feels jittery and like electricity is running along it. He’s nauseated and lightheaded, and more than vaguely detached from reality.

Is he dreaming?

No, he’s not. He knows this feeling, but it’s so hard to think. 

He presses himself to sitting.

_“Where are you?”_ “Де ти?” 

“I...”

Pain, a blow that snaps his head around, skitters over his skin and makes the nausea worse.

_“Where are you?”_ **“Де ти?”**

Right. He’s... not supposed to speak like that. _"An early lesson."_ Ранній урок.

_“Nowhere.”_ “Ніде.” 

_“What are you?”_ “Що ти?” 

_“A tool of indeterminate worth.”_ “Зрозуміла неопределеної вартості.” 

_“Good. We begin again.”_ “Добре. Ми починаємо знову.” 

* * *

He's woken with a kick that dumps him off the cot, and dragged out of his cell.

They don’t say a word, but he does his best to comply, to not make trouble, to not do anything that could possibly be seen as resisting. It’s worse when he resists. Even being off the drugs for a few weeks, it’s always worse when he resists.

Guards drag him down halls he's never seen before and the progression draws more and more people— _prisoners, trainees_ his mind hisses, noting body language and fear-tells and subservience and, from some, _far too much emotion to survive_ —before no more join them the last fifty feet from an external door. 

The dozen and a half of them are loaded onto three modified cargo 'copters and he has enough awareness to know he doesn't like where this is going. There's a crate in the back but none of the prisoners, trainees have weapons.

Someone's taking them either to be scrubbed ( _project canceled, J, dump everything_ ) or used as fodder.

He doesn’t want to die.

 _Survive, survive, survive,_ beats in his blood.

Instead, they're flown to the middle of a very large forest, and strapped with parachutes.

 _“The box contains enough food for one, and the GPS to the rendezvous site. You are two weeks from that place.”_ "Коробка містить достатню кількість їжі для одного, і GPS до місця зустрічі. Ви два тижні з цього місця."

The guard stares at them, perfect white teeth, excepting the one he’s missing. There’s an AS Val gripped in grimy, scarred hands. 

He wants it so badly, he can taste the scuffed paint.

_“If you’re not back in eighteen days, we leave without you. If you arrive second, we’ll shoot you.”“Якщо ви ще не в вісімнадцять днів, ми залишаємо без вас. Якщо ви приїдете по-друге, ми будемо стріляти в вас.”_

__

A vicious grin.

_“Don’t arrive third.”_ "Не прибуває третя." 

* * *

[...]

* * *

_Russ: “You will never be free of the Red Room.”_ _“Вы никогда не будете свободны от Красной комнате.”_

* * *

[...]

* * *

His ears are ringing.

Everything aches.

His throat is dry and the sweat dripping down his head and into his eyes makes the edges of his vision blurry, but if he reaches up to wipe it away, he will more than likely lose the knife.

_“Again.”_ “Знову.” 

He flips the knife.

Again.

* * *

[...]

* * *

She enters the room and his balance shifts.

He’s aware of her, and not even looking in her direction.

It’s been difficult on him, on her. Per her instructions, no one has been allowed in the penthouse since they arrived. No one greeted them at the airport, and only a small contingent of SHIELD personnel saw to their injuries. 

While she is aware that this is continuing his captivity, that she’s taking somewhere he’d created for himself, his own safe space, and perverting it with this experience, there is no other way for her to finish his conditioning.

The Ukrainian separatists had been not indelicate, but they lacked the finesse of the Red Room, and their goal had been a powerful corporate sleeper, not an infiltrator of the highest standard.

It’s possible that she’d left him there too long, that instead of priming him to be malleable, he had been set and cast. The reality is that he might be more Soldier than Widow.

Not a complete loss.

But not the desired outcome.

 _Russ: “Come, Tony.”_ "Идите, Тошка."

* * *

[...]

* * *

He’s snatched the object out of the air before he registers that it’s headed straight for his head, before he registers that it’s a knife.

The living room had been silent–

_It’s always silent_

–and he hadn’t heard anyone coming.

The lights cut and his emotions numb, falling away like the dusk fast approaching, muddled reds from the setting sun eating colours and deepening the pitch of the shadows.

The second object he instinctively knows not to touch.

His instincts are proven right when it explodes into smoke and light against the window behind him.

Flashbangs are brutal, even when you’re not facing them directly.

He coughs through the smoke.

An attack from his left sets his teeth rattling, but he blocks the strike to his kidneys, locks a joint, kicks out at a knee.

Hears _“What are you?”_ “Що ти?”

And his heart freezes.

* * *

[...]

* * *

_“What are you?”_ “Що ти?” 

He doesn’t answer.

Pain.

* * *

_“What are you?”_ “Що ти?” 

He. He is—

* * *

_“A tool of indeterminate worth.”_ “Зрозуміла неопределеної вартості,” crackles through the speakers in a choked voice.

It crackles along the back of her neck like static.

She’s so compromised.

* * *

_“Good. We begin again.”_ “Добре. Ми починаємо знову.” 

He lets the next blow fall, and the next.

If he fights back, it will be worse–

_“Stark, I’m not carrying you fifty kilometers.”_

He’s not...

* * *

“– _ust me_ on this, Coulson, if you don’t get him into detox, if he hallucinates the full dehumanization process, you won’t have an infiltrator, you’ll have a doll!”

Coulson stares at her for another long second before turning to the medical tech standing near the door. “Get Stark out of there and into quarantine. Keep him–,”

Half the cameras go dead.

Natasha turns just in time to watch one of the tactical team go crashing through plate glass and take a header out the window.

Coulson turns back to her. “I think it’s safe to say he’s not remembering the dehumanization stage.”

* * *

He is not there.

__Ukr: “What are you?”_ “Що ти?” _

He’s not in Kiev.

__Ukr: “Who are you?”_ “Хто ти?” _

He’s...

_**_Arb: “Who are you?”_ “من أنت؟” ** _

No, he’s not there, either.

__“Who are you?”_ “أنت؟- т-и--?” _

_Russ: “I am Iron Man.”_ “Я железный человек.” 

* * *

[...]

* * *

He’s done. Incensed. 

She’s left him alone for seven days now, he has nothing to do, nowhere to go.

There is _nothing_ here!

He knows where all the security cameras are, and he slips by them and into the shadows of the emergency stairwell without disturbing a one of them.

His hands start shaking after the first set of stairs.

By the third, his breathing is ragged.

At the fifth he’s forced to sit down before he breaks his neck.

What’s happening to him? He can’t go down his own fucking emergency stairwell now? He’s better than this, _he’s better than this!_

 _Rus: “I am Iron Man.”_ “Я железный человек,” he growls. He's a fucking Avenger.

He hauls himself to his feet. If it takes him an hour, if he has to _crawl_ , he’s doing this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay! So until AO3 figures out how to not make me code 200 lines of CSS just to give mobile users a translation, I'm going to start dropping translation chapters in my fics, or just footnotes if the translation parts aren't too long.
> 
> Unfortunately, will you trust me is long enough and it's footnote is long enough, that I don't feel comfortable adding the translation to notes. I've left most of the relevant scene up in the second chapter, but language does really, honestly, feel like a crackable code to me, so I am going to avoid doing this in the regular fic. It's a stylistic choice.
> 
> Although I'm hoping my next few fic will be clear enough in context that I won't need to do too much direct translating, I'll still provide the translations, but I'm hoping to reduce the need for them.
> 
> Small note: the "[...]" is a notation that means "more is going on here, but we've cut it for reasons", where reasons is usually "I don't want you to get distracted but this isn't the full quote" in journalism and paper-writing.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, that was long. Thank you for sticking through to the end.
> 
> Now the rest of the notes I promised you:
> 
> I'm shammed to admit that this was supposed to be the prequel to a Big Bang that hasn't been finished (Yet.) I'm working on that fic now (It's AU after The Avengers (2012) and a bit of a CA:TWS Fix-it—more on that soon.)
> 
> The thing that had to be established before that BB though was Tony's inability to trust both directly following TA, and the events directly leading to IM3, and CA:TWS. And, specifically, Tony needed to be trained in infiltration and extraction techniques. :) Course I couldn't just have him take classes, though; where'd be the fun in that?
> 
> This was a beast to write, and I have sooooo many fragmented notes that weren't included.
> 
> One of the things my alpha asked about, and that I feel needs to be clarified, is the reason that Tony switches between Russian and Ukrainian. When he was held prisoner, the nationalists wanted and forced him to use Ukrainian. Most Ukrainians speak Russian as well as Ukrainian. 
> 
> So, it made sense that extremist-nationalists would ban Russian and insist that he only speak Ukrainian.
> 
> Also, depending on your source, Tony _already_ speaks Russian.
> 
> Now. I didn't show it, (couldn't get the scene to work) but there was a draft of a scene where they're trying to force him to speak only Ukrainian but Tony rebels and responds exclusively in Russian (this is when they start drugging him.) For him, speaking Russian is spitting in the face of his captors much the way creating Iron Man was his defiance of the Ten Rings. This is why, when he shrugs off the drug from Fury's test, he responds in Russian, "Я железный человек." _I am Iron Man._
> 
> He's once again deliberately revoking his confinement, spitting in the face of his captors.
> 
> ALSO REGARDING NATASHA'S LAST NAME: Romanoff is the just the same as Romanov, but different westernizations of the Cyrillic script. Natasha refers to herself as -nov because that (imo) actually sounds more like the Russian. Also, apparently "Nat" is the American nickname for Natasha and in Russian it's "Tasha." *shrug*
> 
> I'M SORRY, THAT WAS REALLY LONG.
> 
> Thank you for reading. :)
> 
> [Note]: A commentator has pointed out that I got my Crimea confused with my Ukraine. Note has been updated to reflect this.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [art for will you trust me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12160632) by [araydre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/araydre/pseuds/araydre)




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